‘The real danger is that it can all happen at speeds to which humans can’t react. Firms go bankrupt or markets get shattered before anyone’s really realised what’s going on, which is why it’s really important to have the right safeguards in place.’

An arms race has resumed amongst the world’s biggest hedge funds. Seeing the potential of the technologies produced at some of the most prolific Machine Learning groups in big tech companies such as Google and Facebook, a recent article notes that hedge funds are lifting lead Data Scientists to work on building better alpha strategies.

In the past, algorithmic trading prided itself on hiring highly skilled statisticians to sculpt informative signals and combine them in a state-of-the-art model to predict movements in prices. With the success of deep learning software, such as IBM’s Watson, hedge funds now see potential in throwing their financial big data at artificial intelligence at these artificial intelligence black boxes to predict alpha.

Bridgewater hired David Ferrucci, former lead engineer at IBM for developing Watson, Renaissance Technologies was founded by Bob Mercer and Peter Brown, former language recognition leads at IBM, and recently Blackrock hired Bill MacCartney, a former Google scientist.

For these robotics rockstars moving from Tech to Finance, one downside is that there work becomes a lot more secretive. The nature of algorithmic trading is very hush hush with all hedge funds in direct competition with each other. Compared to publishing research papers at IBM or Google, the traders at these funds will have to keep their advances to themselves – which is a loss for the rest of the scientific community.